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March 05, 2005

More Loesser, please!

I've been a fan of Guys and Dolls for years and years, but I'd never seen it performed live until last month, when our neighborhood high school (James Madison Memorial HS, "Memorial" for short) put it on as its winter musical. The curtain opened to the three "gamblers" taking on "Fugue for Tinhorns"—and they nailed it. The show had a Nathan Detroit that could dance as well as he could sing as well as he could act, but everyone was adorably terrific (including the orchestra, which played smartly throughout). What a blast!

And the Mankiewicz film adaptation of Guys and Dolls showed up on the classic movie channel last week. I try to catch this movie whenever it's on TV, despite its flaws. Some of the best songs of the show were left out of the film (a blessing in disguise, probably, as I shudder to imagine Brando attempting "My Time of Day" or Jean Simmons doing "I've Never Been In Love Before"...'cause ain't neither of them can sing), and the songs that were added on for the movie are jarringly not great. Brando is a most peculiar Sky Masterson, but his scenes with Jean Simmons have great chemistry (yeah, chemistry). I mostly enjoy just looking at the movie—a brightly costumed fairy tale. When music videos in the eighties tried to cop the look, sometimes it worked (Janet Jackson, before she went to seedy, in her playful "When I Think of You"), and sometimes it didn't (the retro-Weimar grotesquerie of Madonna's "Open Your Heart").

My favorite cast recordings of this show are (no surprise) the 1990 Broadway revival (in which the women—Faith Prince as Miss Adelaide and Josie deGuzman as Sarah Brown—are particularly perfect) and the original cast album from the fifties (mmm, Robert Alda as Sky, sigh). The cast album from the 1976 revival that headlined Robert Guillaume doesn't quite have the same spark, and although produced by Motown, its TSOP-style orchestrations bring on a strange compulsion to Do The Hustle! And before the days when you could sample before you bought, I picked up a star-turn studio recording with Sinatra (Nathan Detroit in the movie, Sky on this recording), and Dean Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, among others, along for the ride. It's ghastly. Well, mostly—Sammy Davis, Jr. turns out to have just the right timbre and pitch for "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat", the only saving grace of this "what were they thinking?" production.

There's a curiosity in the lyrics to "More I Cannot Wish You" (link here is to a, well, unusual MIDI version of this song on the Department of Health and Human Services' National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences website [huh?]), perhaps the only song in the show in which Frank Loesser doesn't let loose with dazzling melodic effects. Although it's a simple tune, the lyrics include a phrase that for years I assumed I was mishearing as a hallucinated mondegreen: "sheep's eye and licorice tooth". Well, the internet to the rescue: an inquiring mind asked the question in the forums of The Phrase Finder, and got this answer:

In the original Frank Loesser score, the expression is "sheep's eye
and the LICKERISH tooth." Loesser eplained how he arrived at it in a
letter that's printed in his daughter's fine biography of him, A MOST
REMARKABLE FELLA (page 109). The short of it is that he wanted a
companion word that meant "covetous", fearing "sheep's eye" did not
completely convey the exact thoughts of the guy who would be gazing at
her. He went to Roget's and found that "lecherous" was a sort of
synonym for covetous, but didn't quite like the way it sounded, so he
consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found that two archaic
spellings of "lecherous" were "licorice" and "lickerish." He chose the
latter. Voila!

[Original poster responds:] Many thanks [...] - I've been trying to tease out
the meaning for many years. My ear always heard that application, but I
couldn't come up with the "lickerish" thing. Thanks again - I can sleep
easier.

Comments

I'm a big fan of Loesser's, too. There is a fun PBS documentary of the taping of the 1990 revival G&D cast album (which also includes Nathan Lane) that is available on DVD.

During the 1992 season, Goodspeed Opera in Connecticut brought to Broadway a revival of Loesser's Most Happy Fella. It was unique in that they used a Loesser created score that was transposed for two grand pianos (instead of full orchestra).

Given Loesser's penchant for full orchestration, some might think that stripped down version to be a disappointment. But it was not. None of the singers were miked, and it may be the only time I ever saw a Broadway musical unplugged, so to speak. The cast album from that production is good, but the performance itself was quite impressive -- and is still vivid in my mind 13 years later.